Notable game findings with Hallfiry's coverdisk catalogue

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MrFlibble
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Re: Notable game findings with Hallfiry's coverdisk catalogue

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For some reason the playable DOS demo of Screamer Rally is pretty hard to find. Shuffling through archived newsgroup messages lead to a site called 3dfx Mania (which I think is the same thing as the 3D Files). The page at that site mentions a 34 MiB file called srally.zip - which inconveniently coincides with the name of an archive with a demo of a completely unrelated game, Sega Rally Championship.

A catalogue search for "srally" predictably returns a lot of results relevant for Sega Rally Championship - they're all identifiable by the presence of a file called segalogo.bg. However, by almost pure guesswork I determined that this file is the Screamer Rally demo. There are several problems with it though: 1) it's in French, 2) it's zipped up with some version of WinZip that does not unpack well on modern systems (e.g. 7-Zip can't properly extract some files) and 3) the installer expects the source and target directories to be located on different drives (suggesting that this is a covermount demo, not a downloadable one). Other than that, the demo installs and plays as it should.

From the contents of the French zipped demo it became possible to track down all unpacked instances of the demo in the catalogue:
http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... 62482&o=da

Judging by the media, there's one English and one German version (the series is called Bleifuss in German), and the rest seems to be French stuff. Again, all appear covermount releases, not downloadables.

In addition to the 3dfx Mania site (and this page which also mentions a downloadable srally.zip), there's this really obscure fan page of the game:
http://community.fortunecity.ws/underwo ... 2rally.htm

It suggests that the first demo release was in German and the file was called rallydemo.zip (~ 34 MiB in size), and the English demo came out later, is smaller (~ 17 MiB), and the file is called srdemo.zip. The problem is that a demo of Star Rangers is also called srdemo.zip.
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MrFlibble
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Re: Notable game findings with Hallfiry's coverdisk catalogue

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Pyromania (Bomberman clone)
Found at: http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... ar=&o=&dn=
Download: pyro32.zip
NOTES: The original zipped version of the files, if it ever existed, has not been found yet. This game is really obscure.
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MrFlibble
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Re: Notable game findings with Hallfiry's coverdisk catalogue

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It appears that there are more demo versions of Super Street Fighter II Turbo than I thought:

Street Fighter II Milestone 5 CD (1/30/95)
Found at: http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... 45944&o=da
cd.textfiles link: http://cd.textfiles.com/cdromgames/cdromgames6/SF2/
NOTE: This version seems to have been originally supplied with music tracks in WAV format, as shown here.

Super Street Fighter II Turbo (15 March 1995)
Found at: http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... 54606&o=da
cd.textfiles link: http://cd.textfiles.com/qsamania2/MANIA2/AGAMES2/SSFII/
NOTE: This version either originally included WAV format music as well or did not contain any music.

Unknown version 1
Found at: http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... 54561&o=da
TAQ date: 21 March 1995

Unknown version 2
Found at: http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... 47223&o=da
TAQ date: 23 February 1995
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MrFlibble
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Re: Notable game findings with Hallfiry's coverdisk catalogue

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UFO: Enemy Unknown German demo version
Found at: In'side Multimedia CD-ROM July 1994
Download: ufoger.zip (repacked)
NOTES: This version is in all aspects identical to the earlier PC Format demo but the intro/info screens have all text translated into German. The Battlescape interface is still in English though.
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MrFlibble
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Re: Notable game findings with Hallfiry's coverdisk catalogue

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For the lack of a better place to put this, Hallfiry created an updated, offline, Python-based version of the catalogue. Even more coverdisks! Get it here:
http://kultcds.com/Catalog/
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MrFlibble
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Re: Notable game findings with Hallfiry's coverdisk catalogue

Post by MrFlibble »

MrFlibble wrote: July 13th, 2016, 12:53 pm For some reason the playable DOS demo of Screamer Rally is pretty hard to find.
Thanks to the updated catalogue, I was able to track down the original Italian demo and the newer English version as well:
The Games Machine CD-ROM 34 - contains the Italian demo w/ installer
(Czech) Level 35 (1997-12) CD - contains srdemo.zip (installed English demo)
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